


THE KINSEY EVENT, or: From Beta With Love

by marketchippie



Category: Earth Girl Trilogy - Janet Edwards
Genre: F/M, Multi, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 14:52:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3533516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What joke starts with "An Earth girl (the Earth girl), a very-bad-Deltan boy, an Adonis Knight, a nice Alphan girl and their very put-upon very-good-Deltan history team instructor step onto the surface of Zeus"? The one where they forget to check the Betan name for the oh-so-Betan interplanetary event that comes around every twenty-five years. Things go very badly, or very well, or both at once, depending which one of them you ask.</p>
            </blockquote>





	THE KINSEY EVENT, or: From Beta With Love

**Author's Note:**

> For Maddi (tumblr user @belinsky), who is 100% to blame. For everything.
> 
> Post-series. Slang all direct from the books, except obviously the riffs on Eleusis/Kinsey.

Midday on Zeus is crowded. After five weeks at the end of the world with only the dig team’s company, overwhelmingly so. Jarra looks around at the crush of bodies and adverts and noise and feels herself spinning. Then Fian’s hand comes to rest on her elbow and she feels Raven at her other shoulder, and she settles and takes it in, dizziness ceding to excitement. 

She’s still not used to it—none of it. Not the the bright intricately cutout Betan clothes revealing flashes of skin here and there. Not the vids flashing on the walls of the portal hallway, the welcome signs. Not the travel. Never the travel. She’ll reach a hundred and never get tired of it.

No time for basking, though, not with a thousand bodies pushing in around her and her hood up. The three of them manage to get to the smaller portals intact and not crushed to the wall, a minor rush hour victory. Absently, as they wait in line, she takes in a vid-cast projection of a red flower, trying as best she can to take in the narrator through her Betan lilt. What she’s saying is either a warning or a seduction. Both, maybe. 

Betan dialect is still hard for her to keep up with, but Beta is Beta, planets big and small. Fight it though they liked, Beta is Beta no matter the planet. The poor and small ones live by Fidelis as truly as the rich and the rich have the same disarming sensual streak as the sex-vid planets.

She’s mulling on Fidelis, on homeland fidelity as she reaches the front of the line and presses in the coordinates for the Tell clan hall. Not quite home, here. Something else. Home will never be anywhere but Earth, but is a landing point in the reaches of space, now. Home-away-from-Earth, then, home away from the rock-dust of Fortuna which is half hers already. Home on Beta, by blood if not inclination.

Home, and she’s been a bad, bad host. Dalmora already got there this morning, and Playdon with her. A year ago, he’d never have agreed to it, not even out of convenience, but both of them were travelling from Alpha sector today—Dalmora from home, Playdon from visiting Rono and Keren at Rono’s family home. At Fortuna, Playdon wasn’t their professor. He was their leader, which changes little on-site but erodes some of his off-site stiffness. Some. Subtlety invisible to the naked eye—no one would ever call him relaxed. Still, there’s enough difference that they can tease him over dinner at night about dust in his hair or an unloosed tie or an unchecked laugh. And for Jarra to impulsively invite him to come to dinner while he was passing through Alpha and Beta sectors.

She has the run of Tell hall for between a night and a week. Drago told her chaos near every member of the clan was travelling, that almost everyone was gone for the night, that clan dinner was off for one night at least. Amalie and Krath wouldn’t get in from Epsilon until the next day. She frowns slightly, thinking of Dalmora and Playdon travelling alone, half-worrying and half-guilty. Maybe Lolia and Lolmack can make it sooner rather than later—

Her lookup rings and she grins big under her hood. _Think of them and there they are._

“Jarra!” Lolia’s face, grinning herself, pops up on the inside of her hood. “Are you here?”

Jarra nods. “Are you coming to dinner tonight?”

“Given Eleusis, I figure it’s better to meet you tomorrow,” Lolia says with a wicked, decidedly Betan laugh that Jarra heard Lolmack echoing from offscreen. “Unless you want to come to a ‘nal? Though I expect there’s plenty of better ones on Zeus. The parties in our neighborhood would look pretty diminish.”

The line jostles. Jarra feels it through her suit. Whenever she lands in Beta, new things come in packs, never one at a time. Typically, it’s her favorite thing about travel, but she’s got a foot in the portal now and can’t take it in. She’ll ask Lolia to catch her up tomorrow. “I doubt your parties are diminish, but I need to get home.”

“Probably better,” Lolia says wryly. “Tomorrow, then. Be careful but enjoy the view!”

Jarra hangs up, rolling _Eleusis_ over in her head. More botched prehistory in the heart of the Former Second Roman Empire, fine. Neither Fian or Raven had picked up on the conversation, neither is suited up. They could help, but she’ll have to recite it back to them, and right now it’s more trouble than it’s worth. She’s the only one suited up, hood up. Incognito. Her limbs are rock-heavy from the extra hours inside, but it beats the stares. One thing to have people staring at her when there’s a point to the stares, something they’re going to make happen, but on travel days keeping a hood on just makes everything five times easier. Suit fatigue regardless.

She punches in the coordinates for the clan hall, Fian and Raven just a step behind her.

 

 

 

 

 

On the other side of the portal, she pulls down her hood with a happy gasp. “Deity!” She sighs, the air on her cheeks the purest kind of luxury even before she thinks about having a real bedroom inside the hall, with a real bed and real bathrooms. That’s all that’s on her mind, just blank relief, until she turns around.

“Deity!” she gasps again, no longer blank. 

Last she’d been here, the hills around the stone hall had been resplendent with golden Betan grass. Now they’re covered in bright, blazing-red flowers with broad fleshy-looking petals and luminously pink stamens, looking for all the world like Earth stargazers trying to squash, blushing, back into the ground. They lie flat on the grass, deep-rooted, their cups open toward the sky. The air is fiercely fragrant, the scent closer to spice than the Osiris lily cloy. She’s never going to like that smell again.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she heard Raven say behind her and she turns and presses her hand to her heart in an impulsive Betan salute. In reverence of her country, if nothing else, of the world’s infinite surprises. She isn’t the only one who can still be astonished by new and beautiful things. He takes the gesture in, nods. Fian raises his eyebrows, looking amused, and she wants to pull him into her giddiness. Wants to stand ankle-deep in the flowers and take in the view as she wants to take in everything now: from the heart, from the center. She slips her hand into Fian’s, body wretchedly heavy but heart antigrav-light.

The grounds of the half-abandoned clan hall are more truly private than anywhere she’s been since leaving Earth, the flowers the first natural life she’s seen since Fortuna. Now, without a sectorful of people pushing her on, she can bask: in travel, in homecoming, in this. 

The world is vast and gorgeous and hers to see every inch of.

So her suit is too heavy to run in. Nuke the suit, then: she’s rash with exuberance, full of and powered off the beauty of a world she can travel end to end now, and coupled with all that, her skintight is military grade and practically Deltan in modesty.

With a swift yank on her zipper, she starts to peel herself out of the suit. Nothing new about that on-site, or in Military—though they’re not on-site or on-base now.

“Jarra,” Fian starts, half chastising and half very much not, and she grins over her shoulder at him.

“No lace.”

Not that he needs reminding. He was there when she’d gotten dressed. Still, she can see color rise to the tips of his cheeks, his smile going sharp at the edges, and the mix of Deltan good and Deltan very-bad makes her think about what she wants to do when they got inside.

Raven turns slightly to the side as she unpeels the suit from her sticky limbs. Privacy with a bodyguard is an intimate labyrinth: she’s suited and unsuited a thousand times for digs or for Military meetings, with an audience of armies and entire teams around her, and it never mattered, then. But the difference matters to him now, whether it’s training or just Alphan manners. Neither on-site or on-base now, so now he’s looking with aggressive intensity at the landscape as though trying to stare the flora into submission. A courtesy, if one she hadn’t asked for or needed.

And all right, she thinks, looking back at Fian, maybe the modesty of her skintight had been an exaggeration. Maybe not quite Deltan. Or maybe they’ve just been a long time travelling, and she’s been a long time under the hood.

“You’re a natural Betan,” he says with a swallow.

“When in Rome,” she giggles: one of the Betan-dialect phrases she’s picked up that’s stuck.

The pinwheeling Zeus suns warm her and catch the light under her skin, doubling it. She leans up to kiss Fian—tripling it. She offers him her hands, pulling him forward into the field with her, feet clumsy but cautious as she feels flowers brushing her soles. Turning, wrapping Fian’s arms around her waist, she looks out at the bright-red floral sea before her, the flowers that have come up from nothing and swallowed the landscape whole—and gives into exhausted giddiness and slides down the stretch of Fian behind her. Lies down among them and lets her limbs go limp on the petalled bed. Underneath her, the flowers are opening and crushing, their light velvet touch carrying her gentle-handed. It is, she thinks absurdly, looking up at Fian through the sun and the imperfect veil of her lashes, like being loved.

“This is new,” she says.

Fian kneels beside her, knees crushing more flowers and sending up a new wave of scent. Deity, it’s been a day. He pulls her head onto her lap, pressing his fingers lightly into her temples, and she actually moans aloud in pleasure.

“Betan Event, do you think? Or just seasonal?”

_I thought it was fall, not spring,_ she thinks. Or would if she was thinking. She’s not. Not with his hands doing what they’re doing. His massage drowns out words in her head, connective tissue: she feels the whorls of his fingerprints, the gentle pressure in his palms, each small motion smoothing away the vague ache of the day. Nothing blurry or painful about what she’s feeling now, though nothing that can hold thoughts and words. Her shoulders press against the ground, her spine arching with pleasure. A shadow stretches over her face and Fian’s hair brushes her cheeks, his lips skimming her forehead, his face burying into her hair.

“Your hair is full of flowers,” he says and takes a good breath, and she smiles and closes her eyes, pressing her head harder against the tensing muscles in his thighs. She can feel everything with ten times the clarity now that she’d taken off her suit. Everything in her is good right now. So, so good.

“I think—” Raven coughs and she opens her eyes. There is a strange look on his face, his eyes still determinedly on the skyline. “I think we ought to go inside.”

“Oh, Raven, why?”

Her voice comes out wheedling, distant. Zeus sunsets are famously lush—that, she remembered, the suns sinking down in a rolling bloody dance and then night rolling in like credits over the end of a _Stalea_ ep, before things can get really fun. She wonders how the sun will look sinking into this splendid floral sea. She could stay here for hours. Days, if Fian keeps his his hands busy.

For all the world, Raven looks like he wants to take off. His feet stay planted, though, even as he turns from her, even as he opens his mouth in private out-loud dialogue with the implant.

“SECOP,” he says, and he’s no longer speaking to her, “there’s no way the Kinsey event could be today, is there?”

“Sure is. Every twenty-five years, Birdy, regular as clockwork. Didn’t keep a calendar?”

He switches off abruptly. “Not,” he says to nobody, half resigned and half snarling at himself, “a Zeus one.”

Jarra raises her eyebrows. They meet Fian’s fingertips halfway up her forehead. Raven’s voice is tense, but it’s nearly impossible to be concerned.

“What’s on the calendar?” she asks, and Raven shakes his head sharply.

“We can’t talk out here. Let’s get inside.”

“You can’t, maybe, wait for us inside?” Fian asks, not sounding like he expects an answer in the affirmative. He doesn’t get one. Jarra sighs and leans against him, letting him help roll her back into standing, and then half-runs after Raven, who’s already halfway to the door—what chimera’s chasing him? She gathers up a handful of flowers in her palms as she stands, follows Fian, liking this view about as much as the one she’s turning from. He’s in rumpled civilian clothes and very pretty indeed with petals in his half-bound hair: she wants to bite what’s left of his ponytail.

Later, Jarra. Bad, bad Jarra. Though he looks over his shoulder at her like he wants biting very badly.

 

 

 

 

 

Raven beats them inside by a long shot, disappearing through the door without a word, which has Jarra sulking a little until Dalmora comes to stand in the doorway. She has a glowing hostess-smile on, and Jarra stops feeling bad—as bad—about leaving her the run of the house. She’s a natural here. She always is. “I’m so glad you’re finally here,” she says warmly.

Jarra hugs her, burying her face briefly in her hair. So soft, next to her cheek, even with the lights strung through. The netted light under her own skin tangles with the lights in Dalmora’s hair and the lesser light of the glitter stitched into her sari-hem, all of them making radiant war with each other. Jarra cracks an eyelid and let her vision blur into pleasant daytime starlight. 

She realizes she’s crushing the blossoms in her hand against Dalmora’s already fragrant hair and pulls back. “For you,” she says, a giggle rising in her throat, and Dalmora smiles and presses the bouquet to her nose. It leaves luridly pink pollen on the tip of her nose, the edges of her full lips. Somehow it looks as pretty, not just ridiculous. The giggle stays in Jarra’s throat.

“They’re gorge, thank you,” Dalmora says. “It’s been amaze watching them bloom—I’ve never seen anything like this anywhere in Beta before, and there weren’t half so many even an hour ago.”

Dalmora’s eyes are bright and soft, shining, as they always shine for beautiful things. The brightness in them catches and reflects the red blossoms, makes them bloom double in the dark compassionate sea of her eyes. She tucks one, the size of her palm, behind her ear, careless of the dirty roots, and Jarra finds that she hasn’t stopped giggling since she started. Soil spills onto Dalmora’s neck, in her hair. She reaches out to brush it away, to put her hand back in the soft night sky of Dalmora’s hair, and Fian catches her hand midair. Not trapping her, not pulling her back. Only she’s been idling with it in the air longer than she realized.

Now he kisses it, and that’s even better. She relaxes into the kiss, feeling every line of his lips clearly drawn against her knuckles, and Raven tears back around the corner, a surprising flush high on his severe face.

“Dalmora, put those down.”

“What’s the matter?” Dalmora asks, turning calmly toward the wall in search of somewhere to put the flowers. “Jarra, where can I put these? I’m sure the hall has a few of those prehistorical replica vases lying around.”

_Amphorae_. Plural of _amphora_. The name is on the tip of Jarra’s tongue, carried all the way out of prehistory, and it stays there. She breathes it slowly to life, luxuriating along the _m_. The buzz of it lingers. The word was out of her mouth a few breaths back, and now she’s simply humming in content. Dalmora gives her an amused look, the bright warmth in her eyes deepening. Jarra could drown in them. Or in Fian’s mouth, where her fingertip is making itself at home. Anywhere. Her body pulling her in several directions, ecstatically unhindered and full of sensation. So many directions, really, that she doesn’t have to move at all.

“It’s the Kinsey event.”

This again. Jarra’s listening—she _is_. She can be happy and listening at once.

The phrase means something to Dalmora, but she looks unperturbed. “Don’t be silly,” she says. “There’d be cautions everywhere, and I haven’t heard the word Kinsey on a single vid-cast since I got here.”

_Such_ a prehistorical Earth name. Not as fun to say. Jarra wrinkles her nose. “Maybe it doesn’t look good on an amphora,” she says, trying out _amphora_ again and finding it just as delightful this time around. “And we did see casts. In the portal station.” She plucks a flower back from Dalmora’s hands and Raven recoils, taking a step back. Jarra pouts. She wishes he’d relax. Or not look at the flower like it’s hiding chimera underneath, like it’ll turn into an Adonis swamp hydra if she keeps stroking it.

“Do you remember what the casts were saying?” he asks.

“I remember Lolia mentioned that Eleusis was tonight.”

Recognition takes his face and shakes him down. All of a sudden, he looks like he wants to throw something. “Chaos take Betans and their Roman names!” he says with a vehemence that could have startled her, except that she’s calm right down to her bones, calm and slow and warm under her skin. It’s so nice out, she thinks. He shouldn’t get so worked up.

“Eleusis,” she says, lifting a finger with the hand that isn’t tracing Fian’s lips, “is _Greek_ prehistory, not Roman—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says tersely, and Dalmora comes back around the corner with a decorative bowl in her arms. She dumps in the flowers as though they’re scalding her, as though the beauty’s gone out of them all at once. As though she can’t see it through the haze of whatever panic’s got her now.

“Oh, yes, it does!” She pulls a pink-spotted hand up to her pink-spotted face, her mouth, and starts coughing, eyes tearing up. “Oh chaos—what are we going to do?”

“I’ll get them to the bedroom.”

Like _they’re_ not even there.

“And I’ll—” A look of sudden determination focuses Dalmora’s features under the dusting of pollen. Jarra watches her intently, eyes catching along the accidental patterns of pollen on Dalmora’s cheeks. Her own hand draws from the corner of Fian’s lips into his long fair hair. She feels uniquely observant, her hands as well as her eyes. Like she could archive every one of her friends inch by inch, if they let her. With her eyes and her fingers and—and the rest of her, too.

“I’ll go talk to Playdon,” Dalmora is saying.

“Is that a good idea?”

“If anyone here will know what to do, it’ll be him.” She is already halfway back around the corner. “He’s got protocols for absolutely everything.”

She leaves with her shoulders high, chin lifted, as if she’s parading for the glory of Alpha sector. Dalmora, the loveliest of floats. Jarra wants to salute her. She presses an arm to her heart again and means it.

With a look of deep resignation, Raven steps behind Jarra and Fian. “Bedroom,” he says, putting a hand on Jarra’s shoulder and unfixing her fist from her heart. Then on Fian’s shoulder. Guiding both of them forward.

Jarra twists around. His hand makes a pleasantly firm indent on her bare shoulder. “What’s this about?”

The flush hasn’t gone from his face. “I’d rather you ask Drago, or—”

“Drago?” She coughs out a laugh. “What can he tell me that you can’t?”

“I would rather not be the one to explain it.”

The discomfort on his face is particular and familiar. She’d seen it when he’d caught her pinning Fian to the floor with her sleep suit half undone; she’d seen it when Krath had recapped _Stalea of the Jungle_ in too-colorful detail. “What has a flower got to do with _tumbling?_ ” she asks impatiently, and she feels his hand tighten for a moment on her shoulder. A brand-new flesh-to-flesh conversation. The archivist under her skin is vividly interested.

“You just dove facefirst into the flower that sponsors the sex vid industry,” he says flatly. “Both of you. Now will you go into your bedroom and call Drago?”

Jarra claps a hand over her mouth and, telling her senses to shut up, does the only sensible thing. She breaks into a run, bare feet pounding over the cold stone of the halls on the way to her room.

 

 

Her thoughts catch up to her once she’s reached the bedroom and flopped down on the bed. For a while, Raven’s and Fian’s footsteps had been clear behind her, then eventually not. Fian’s been to the Tell hall plenty with her, but not quite as often as she has, still, and his head was hardly on straight right now. Or hers. Alone in the room, she puts a pillow on her head, feeling every inch a nardle.

Somewhere past the dining hall, she’d lost track of his footfalls following hers, but she’d bet the Deity that Raven hadn’t. Meantime, Drago _would_ know what was going on—Raven was right about that.

She punches his number into her lookup and after a very long set of rings gets an answer: a very rumpled answer, an answer very much _not_ in a sleep suit.

Drago usually doesn’t affect her one way or the other, but there’s something today about his bare shoulders and tousled hair that makes his handsomeness strike at the core of her. Everything hits the same place, warm and thrumming, inside her.

There _is_ something about the flower.

The distance helps, though. She keeps her eyes on his shoulders. No, above them. Neck up. Chin up. Eyes up? All right, Jarra, keep your eyes on the top of his head.

“Jarra?”

“What’s Eleusis?”

“Oh, nuke,” he says and starts laughing.

Laughter isn’t an answer, but it’s the only thing he gives her, for about five years. “What?” she finally has to ask him, and he shakes his head. She thinks she can see a flush on his neck. Not from blushing. From kissing. _Oh_ , she thinks, clutching harder at the pillow.

“Eleusis is Zeus’s central Mystery, sorry, Event, though just about every planet in Beta sector grows Eleusis blossom now. Harmless. Unless you’re around the wrong sort of people.” He starts laughing again. “Who are you around?”

She squints, hears Lolia’s laughter echoing against his in her thoughts. “Are you at a ‘nal?” she asks slowly, and his laughter takes on the sound and strength of a rocket launching.

“No thanks. I’m a happily married man, Jarra.”

She hears Marlise’s voice reply with an indistinct question offscreen and then yelp as Drago begins to turn—she must be out of her sleep suit too, Jarra realizes, imagining and feeling her cheeks heat. Hence the fresh-kissed throat. She wants to rub her eyes—she needs to stop seeing so clearly. 

Drago turns back to his lookup and rolls his eyes heavenward, laughing still. It’s not nearly as funny as he thinks. Hadn’t years in Military taught him that _nothing_ was as funny as he thinks? No nuking sympathy, she thinks, crossing her arms tight across her chest. “Jarra,” he says, not to Jarra. “She’s gone loosey-goosey.”

“I’ve _what?_ ”

She hears the _a_ in _what_ catch in the air, feels the word drag itself off her tongue. The air is sweet in her mouth, still flower-spiced. She licks her lips, tasting residual pollen. Blinks, then, and belatedly remembers to look her lookup in the eye. Or above.

Drago is shaking his head, trying not to laugh any more. Not succeeding.

“You’re bad off.” He looks considering. “Wonder if your immune system’s extra susceptible—”

“I,” she says hotly, “am _fine_.”

“Just new to Eleusis,” he says, easily, and maybe the pillow on her head is helping her get her thoughts in order, or maybe it just helps to look as nardle as she feels. She has to think. _Eleusis, leusis, lucid_ —no, not lucid, not even with the lights dazzling her at the tips of her own fingers, not even with the echoing lanterns of Dalmora’s hair-lights behind her eyes. Loosey-loose. She feels loose, her joints pliant, her skin hot. She’s getting a good idea of what it means. “It’s what they make zee out of in lower colonies. What they take before they make vids. So the vid-making is—pleasant and enthusiastic for everyone involved.”

_Zee._ Lower colonies. Not like her kin in their fancy home, the halls of which have apparently swallowed Fian whole. Kin, zee. Event. “Kinsey?”

“Like the prehistorical sex doc. Rest of the sectors’ term. Too clinical, I think. _We_ think.” _We Betans._ She is Betan by blood, whether or not by instinct—whether or not by instinct, _Fian Eklund_ , she thinks. She doesn’t know how she feels about any of this. Even if she doesn’t much care for Kinsey as a name. Nothing in that. (Nothing about her latent Betan-ness in that, _Fian Eklund_.) “More like the Eleusinian mysteries. We like to celebrate our events. Carefully, with hand-picked company. They can grow the flower in greenhouses, so it’s only the Event that matters. Tradition and all, and it’s only a day long. Can’t you just lock yourself in a room with Fian until the night’s out?”

“There are more people here!” she says despairingly, and Drago laughs again, though kindly.

“It’s not the end of the world. Consider it a celebration of your heritage. It won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. It’ll just make Beta that much more welcoming.” He grins fit to split the screen. “Now I have to get back to my wife.”

The door of the bedroom opens as she hangs up, and Fian spills into the room, finally. Bafflingly, holding a vase. He gives her a vast, blissful grin before he trips, though he curls his body around the vase and lands clean. The fall turns into a practiced combat somersault, his body relaxing into it with startling ease. “You wanted an amphora,” he says, and she had, though she can’t remember why. The flowers are back in the foyer and mostly she’d liked the way the word melted on her tongue, sweet and heavy with history and humming in her mouth. He could make her hum with pleasure in other ways, she thinks, opening her arms.

She knows why he’s acting such a nardle. “Loosey-goosey,” she says with a giggle. He looks up from the floor at her, hazy with delight.

“Say that again.”

“Loose—”

“No.” He sits up and rolls the vase under the bed, forgetting about it as quick as she had. As quick as he’d fallen and bounced back up. “After that.”

She leans in off the edge of the bed and he lays a hand under her chin, stroking from her lower lip down to the ticklish soft part of her throat. Squealing with laughter, she jerks back, and he grins up at her like she’s the only thing he ever wants to see again. “That. Yes.” She giggles wildly, pressing her hands to her face, watching the lights under her skin flicker and glow at the edges of her vision. And in his eyes. “ _Jarra_ ,” he says, breathing her name with glorious astonishment even if he’s heard her giggle a thousand times, even if her face was the first thing he saw this morning when he woke up. Like it’s brand new, still.

Well, she’s not tired of his, either.

An embarrassed cough. She looks up and sees Raven at the doorway. “Fian, you’re going to want to take a shower,” he says

Fian stands up, easy on his feet. “Why?”

“For the, ah, Eleusis blossom.”

No recognition on Fian’s face. He’s no clearer-headed than she’d been before talking to Drago. She offers him the pillow that had rested so comfortably on the top of her head, and he takes it uncomprehendingly. Oh, she thinks: “I’ll bet they don’t teach the Eleusinian Event, the Kinsey Mysteries, on Delta,” she says, giggling again in spite of herself, and Raven’s face falls once more.

“No, probably not. Jarra, will you explain this to him? I’ll—”

“The flower just makes you really extra excited about tumbling,” she says and spread her arms easily, falling back onto the bed. And why not? _It won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,_ and she _had_ wanted to lie down in a flowerbed and to touch Dalmora’s hair and she wants Fian to lie down with her now. Nothing nardle has happened yet. This is the safest she’s been in a long while.

Lying down, now, she feels as though she’s lain in the center of one of the great red flowers, embraced by the velvety petals, open and warm. “I’ll bet it feels amaze. Get over here.”

“You should take a shower,” Raven says nervously, and she rolls over to look at him.

“Why?”

“Yes, Raven, why?” Fian turns toward Raven, squaring his shoulders and stepping forward. “Do you think we’ll stop wanting to tumble each other if we wash off?”

Jarra blinks, startled. There’s an edge in Fian’s voice she hadn’t heard him use since the first days of Raven’s bodyguarding.

Drago hadn’t said anything about anger, bad moods. She pushes herself up, a little slow, trying to reach for him, to pull him back. Just the sensation of sheets dragging along her skin is enough to make her bite back a little squeal. How can Fian have a single sour thought in his head right now? He’d taken in just as much of the flower as she had, and his delicate Deltan system would be just as unused to it as hers, _thank you very much Drago Tell Dramis_ —

Then Fian takes another step toward Raven and she looks at the cast of his body and wants to hit herself in the head. No, this is a different kind of edge. For chaos sake, she and Fian have picked enough fights in private for her to recognize it. She’d just never heard him use this voice with anyone else before.

“Come on, Captain Draven Fedorov Seti Raven,” Fian says and taps Raven lightly on the shoulder. “Come on, Knight of Adonis. Do you want to stay or do you want to go? What is it that you want, exactly?”

“I want you to take a shower,” Raven says, his face and voice level, only the slight lingering flush beneath the black and white lines on his cheeks betraying any sign of discomfort.

If he keeps this up, she realizes, Raven is going to knock him down. And the way things are going, that’s exactly what he wants.

“Fian,” she says, and she wishes she could sound stern or commanding or, chaos, even practical, but her voice seems to be coming from her toes and, come to think of it, the warm idiocy under her skin really wants to see what would happen if Raven tosses Fian across the room. She grinds the heels of her hands down against her eyelids, striving for even a speck of clarity. The effects wouldn’t make any of them do anything they didn’t want to do—still, bad, bad Jarra!

When she looks up, Raven’s eyes are on hers, not on Fian. He raises an eyebrow and she knows he’s asking for permission. More complication: he’s assigned to guard her, and Fian comes with that. But if Fian’s asking to get himself thrown across the room, then she supposes he needs to be guarded from himself.

“Raven,” she says, “it’s okay.”

He does not look reassured.

She sits up, her body arching forward slowly and annoyed at the need for collection when all she wants to do is lie back and let the world sing to her skin. “Fian,” she says again, and he turns to her and steps forward, face caught between combat and anticipation.

When he reaches out she catches him by the shoulder and watches his eyes go dark with desire. Her hand is fiercely, unbearably warm against his shirt.

Easier on Raven if she’s the one to do it. Not that she minds.

His body lean into the hold and lift—too easily, her aim is off, his long body half-ragdoll under the push of her shoulder and elbow and knee. He falls and she watches, every second slow and clear. His head cracks against the corner of floor and wall and bounces, and she gasps, her breath flagging. When she reaches him—slow, too slow—his eyes are shut, and she presses her hand to her mouth, pushing back a cry that hadn’t quite made it onto her still-lazy tongue. Eleusis fog massages the tension from her muscles, but her brain’s at war with it now, her few working thoughts trying frantically to slough off the sensory flood and do something _useful—_

“I think he just fainted,” Raven says behind her. “Eleusis makes you—overreact.” His voice is apologetic. “You’re doing it yourself, a little. Look at him.”

She puts her hand on Fian’s chest, feels the regular rise and fall of his breath, smooths fair hair from off his unbruised forehead, and the Eleusis fog wins. “I think you’re right.” Her hand draws a line down his chest and then stops at his belt. It takes every inch of sense not to let her hand slip lower. She sits back on her heels instead, withdrawing her hand, fingers restless in the air.

After a moment, Raven takes her hand, lets her brace against him as she stood up. She’s a Military officer and hardly needs help standing. Still, it feels good to have his hand in hers. It’s been so long since her skin has touched skin. Minutes. Hours, even. She keeps it there as she steadies herself on her feet. “I trust you,” she says. “You wouldn’t have hurt him. Though you could have thrown him.” 

She was so calm on the bed, and she’s calm now, but she senses the limits of it now too. Eleusis isn’t just peaceful. Fian proved that much. What she _wanted_ from Fian proved that much. Even steady, now, she can feel it rising and falling within her, heat turbulent under her skin. Hot and hotter. Hard to rest easy in it, harder every second. Her hand is so warm she’s surprised Raven hasn’t said something about it. Then again, he wouldn’t.

“I’ve never heard of Eleusis making someone—angry before.” He glances down. “There must be side effects—”

She giggles and he gives her a swift, startled look. “That wasn’t anger,” she says. “I meant you could have thrown him and he would have liked it.”

His mouth opens and then closes again.

With the hand that isn’t holding his, she smooths the creased edge of his shoulder where Fian poked at him. _What is it that you want, Knight of Adonis?_ He’d breathed in just as much Eleusis perfume as the rest of them, and his hand is still in hers, and his eyes are on her and her reflection, small in them, is aglow. Aglow even as his eyes darken, as his pupils grow wider and wider the longer her hand stays on his shoulder, stroking the lines of his uniform.

She’d been in the field, and Fian too, and they hadn’t been alone.

Not that she would have known it now from looking at him, not with the evenness on Raven’s face, the unbroken practiced stoicism that keeps his features in check even now. Except his eyes. 

She wondered, now, what it would take to disturb that stillness. What impossible strength, too, to keep it, if he feels like she does.

“How are you this unfaze?” she wonders aloud, drawing a line from shoulder to shoulder across his chest. A perfect, Military-regulation line across the high collar of his jacket. Beneath the collar, she feels him swallow; beneath her touch, feels his body tighten up. How, when she’s so liquid, such a sea of sensations? If he feels anything like what she feels—

“I’ve trained,” he says, almost wry, though his mouth is drawn too tight to smile and he persistently won’t look her in the eye, “in harsh environments.”

He does. Feel what she feels, what Fian does. The needy under-the-skin heat.

Even now, she sees remnants of bright fragrant dust on his face. Some lining beneath his lower lip. She raises her hand to his face to brush it away, sees him draw back, though not too far. Her thumb catches his lip and the skin there is soft, maybe the only softness on his face. No: he closes his eyes, for a moment, not fully relaxing, just a flick of his lashes, and that too is a minute softness, a betrayal of his stoicism.

“Raven,” she says. His name is somewhere between _amphora_ and _kinsey_ on the pleasure-scale. Not the sigh of _Fian_ , either. It has angles, it catches on her tongue and forces something like clarity when she says it, sharp through the simple intoxicating warmth of his face under her hand.

She sees him so clearly, his eyes dark and wide and wider as she keeps her fingers on his mouth. Sees, in a blink, his body split in two by the laser, brief and flickering before the warm wrap of Eleusis fogs the bad memories away. The clarity remains.

He’s hurt himself so many times for her and Fian. Beyond his duty. This—the level face, the stiff shoulders, the pulling back—is another in a long line of beyond-the-call. She shakes her head slowly.

There is lucidity in Eleusis after all.

She says to him, “This isn’t harsh.”

Lifting her hand to his face, she runs her fingers lightly over the tattooed black and white lines on his cheek, and his eyes close briefly. Stoic Captain Draven Fedorov Seti Raven, Knight of Adonis, who has borne the worst of space and the worst of Earth alike, who would die for her and Fian, who had, sighs into her touch, and the names and titles that moved through her thoughts like honey just a second before slide with clean finality out of her head. She’d heard them in Fian’s voice, the heat-edged challenge in them. She’s not challenging now. She’s soft with him, the warmth of his breath singing against her fingertips. She feels his breath through every line of her body.

_It won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do._

She trusts Drago. And she trusts Raven, and Fian, steady-hearted Fian blinking slowly into consciousness on the floor already. Everyone in the room right now.

She raises her face and let her nose brush his. Lets her lips press against his, which still wear the shape of the sigh.

She feels him, for a moment, relax against her.

Never once has she seen him relaxed. She’s not seeing him now. Only feeling him. Eyes closed, she winds an arm around his neck. There’s more skin to skin: the inside of her wrist up to the soft bare inside of her elbow, sliding over the space above his high Military collar and feeling gooseflesh rise on the back of his neck. Running her wrist gently over the back of his neck, she feels the short hair prickle up at her touch and swears she could feel the memory of the razor that had drawn over the skin. Sharpness and softness. Tensile strength in the lines of his body and the warmth of his breath on her lips.

He is kissing her back, but softly, too softly, lips careful with hers, hands careful on her hips. As though he can’t feel how powered she is, how the loose languor in her bones kindles into need at the moment of contact. When she opens her eyes, she sees light reflected onto his face, her own soft reflected glow. It softens the harsh lines on his cheeks. She kisses him again, mouth pressing firmly to his lower lip in a long, sweet, far-from-satisfying peck that tastes like she’s carrying the flower in her mouth, and hears him make a sound, low in his throat. _Oh,_ she thinks, and the still and stoic lines of his body are unbroken even now but maybe that’s good. She lets herself melt against him, knowing that he’ll keep her upright.

He makes another sound as her hips slide against his and she feels stiffness that doesn’t have anything to do with stoicism. The opposite. He reacts—nuke, does he react.  His hands go to her shoulders, skin to skin, and she thinks her skin will dissolve, overwhelmed by the contact. But sweetly, maybe, leaving nothing behind but a cloud of sensation wrapped around a web of light. Glowing. She whimpers softly, rolling her shoulders into the press of his palms, and feels him flinch and step back so swift and far she can feel air hitting the front of her legs. For all that, he doesn’t take his hands away. Even as his hips brace back, canting away from hers, even as his body angles and contorts so he can try having and not-having at the same time.

Beside her, she hears a shifting and a footfall, and when she takes a breath she turns to see Fian standing again. Her heart rises. She turns to look at him without pulling back.

“How about an answer, Adonis Knight?” Fian crosses his arms, the fight in him still intact. “Why did you make Jarra throw me? Can’t fight your own battles?” He takes a long careful stride and Jarra catches the awkwardness in his walk. Not from his head—not fight-rattled—but from his hips, pushing his knees apart, careful between his legs. He reaches Jarra’s side and she takes a hand from Raven’s shoulder. Just the one. Touching one person is necessary. Touching two—she reaches out, pulls Fian behind her, leans back against him—blizz.

She presses against him and feels the line of him in his trousers against the cleft of her legs, how hard he is. She’d seen it in his walk—chaos, she’d seen it when he lay on his back, fight-jarred, half-conscious but full of desire. She knew him. Knows him. 

Her hand on the back of his neck digs in, fingers scratching through his hair, and he wraps an arm around her waist, proprietary. Face beside hers, he’s still watching Raven. Her hand is still on Raven’s shoulder, and Raven—he stands before them, stonefeatured, like she’s just kissed a statue. But he’s not, not stone, not immovable. His shoulders rise and fall and she can feel the uneven catch of his breath.

She knows him, too, and she doesn’t. Only that he’s got a faceful of pollen and a heart full of her and Fian and it still isn’t enough to trip him up.

“I know what Jarra can do,” Fian says, and she feels the heavy rise and fall of his breath in his chest against her back. “Why don’t you show me?”

Her Deltan boy, always frank. She giggles and it catches in her throat, catches on the raw dry _want_ coursing through her. She can’t hold it in. She turns to kiss him, to even out the kissing, and the minute her hand goes slack, Raven steps back.

“I should leave.”

His eyes, iris swallowed whole by pupil, flick from Jarra to Fian and back, as though they are two faces of the same creature. Perhaps they could be. Under Eleusis, skin melts against skin, touch kindles against touch. She’s given in to being Betan about this, in her head: Drago is right. This is something to be celebrated.

Raven is just out of her light, and she wants more than anything to bring him back in. To let him be with them, to let them all dissolve into each other. He’s earned this a thousand times over—earned an ease he won’t take. Even through Eleusis’s warm and forgiving haze, the image of him in two parts on the floor, the laser-light and the blood on the floor, hints around the edges. She wants to see beneath his jacket, to see the unmarked torso beneath, to touch him and remind all of them that he is whole now.

She reaches out, and Fian’s hips press against her from behind, wanting and agreeing.

Eleusis makes her slow and the slowness is sweet but it hasn’t dulled Raven quite yet. Can’t compete with the training of the trials: he blinks and she sees him measuring the two of them and seeing one more test. Blinks again, the desire stark on his face, unbanished, unmasked.

Maybe that’s why he turns away.

“I’ll stand guard,” he says and then he’s out the door.

The door swings shut and she can hear footsteps—not walking, running. The image of him is a still-hanging blur in her hazy vision. “No,” she says, reaching out after him, but the door is shut and there is no Raven in the room.

Something presses up on her heart from beneath it. Knowledge, maybe, fighting the fog. Perhaps she’s thinking of the wrong piece of prehistory, but she thinks she remembers now, the rites after which the Betans gave the Eleusis Mystery its name. Thinks she remembers a story of a man torn to pieces in loving hands. Schoolwork swims in her head, and Fian takes her hands, which are snatching at the air. His palms are smooth and warm on her knuckles and she goes still, focused by contact again.

Pulling them back, he kisses her knuckles. She catches him by the collar and tugs him in hard—he inhales sharply and at least she knows what he wants and he’ll let her give it to him.

She trips him, knocking him flat on his back and gasping onto the floor. This time, though, she’s going down with him, there to catch his head and cradle it in her hands, sliding her fingers through his long pale hair. To kiss him deeply until they’re half-drowning, gasping for breath against each other’s mouths. She presses her body to his, reaching for his toes with her toes and his shoulders with her shoulders, breasts (she’ll let herself think in forbidden words) flush on his chest and hips rolling over hips. He catches her legs in his hands, clutching at the curve of her back and stroking all the way down to the backs of her thighs to hold her in place on top of him.

Face to face with him, almost too near to see, she presses her nose to his and feels the echo of Raven between their faces. Nose to nose for kissing and fighting. “You love him too,” she says accusingly.

“I wasn’t going to talk,” Fian says, shifting his hips against hers and closing his eyes.

She presses her fingertips to his eyelids, drawing them unwillingly open. “But you do,” she says. _Eleusis won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. Eleusis, loose, lucid._ The flickering, painful memories don’t just belong to her.

His eyes roll, expression clear even beneath the glaze of blizz on his face. “Yes,” he says, simply, and the breath she sighs out releases a hold on her whole body. In his, too. Fian leans up to kiss her, nipping lightly at her lower lip, and she doesn’t see blood when she closes her eyes. She feels him shake his head, his half-frown against her mouth. “Betan to the nuking core.”

She gasps, and he draws a hand between the cleft of her legs. Over the surface of her skintight but down toward dark warm wet heat, and she gasps again, not for rudeness this time. He grins and she puts her palm against his throat as he strokes her, pushes hard on his Adam’s apple, and he draws a rough breath, his hips driving up hard against hers, pressing the ridge between his legs against her thigh. Her fingers rise from his throat, catch on his lips, claw at the skin of his mouth, and the scratch of her nails and the pressure on his throat goad him together—she knows him, knows him clearer than ever now that they’re swimming in the same blizzed-out sea. His other hand anchors her, possessive, against the curve of her back, clutching her against him.

They are happy together and there is still room for more.  Kissing him, she leans in, her arm hard against his throat. Feeling the stutter and hitch of his breath, she winds a finger into his hair—tugs until he whimpers, kisses the whimper from his lips. She wants an admission. For now, this will do.

_It’s not a Betan thing,_ she wants to say. _It’s_ _us. All three of us_.

An irrevocably Betan statement. It catches on her tongue and she forgets the words for what she’s thinking—they’re all in Betan dialect, anyway. Fian’s fingers slip beneath the edge of her skintight, stroking over her thigh and higher, and when he slips between her legs the haze takes her whole.

For a moment she stops being able to see, and for a moment she’s just like she imagined: skinless boneless sensation and light.

Until she blinks her eyes back open, her thighs shaking and her head dizzy, like she’d been the one to knock it on the wall. Fian stares at her openmouthed, grazzed. With one weak hand, the other still firmly on her thigh, he waves back and forth between them: to her skintight, to his civvies.

“We should take these _off_.”

 

 

 

 

 

Dalmora reaches Playdon’s rooms after a careful walk through the halls. Quick of Raven to notice. She hadn’t taken enough in to be really affected, she thinks. She’s steady on her feet. She’s not compromised, here. She just wants to know if there are any preventative measures she might take. And the others will need help, of course.

Pressing her lips together, she tries not to notice that she tastes like perfume as she raises a fist to knock on the door. 

Playdon answers the door at second knock, looking at her with some surprise. “Dinner already?”

She giggles, so high she sounds like Jarra. “Were you napping?” she asks. Then blinks. That was a foolish question, to say nothing of—awfully, awfully forward. Forward, much as her feet are taking her. She’s stepped into the room already. Far enough in that she was beyond the door. She doesn’t remember getting that far. If he’d been napping, he would have been in a sleep suit. Or it would have taken him an hour to get ready. She’d never see Playdon in a sleep suit if he could help it. Deity help her, she wants to be better than trying to imagine it.

She is absolutely not. The image takes her and spins her until she has to sit down. The edge of the bed comes up to meet her legs, hard.

“Dalmora,” Playdon says, and he says her name wonderfully and the room seems to think so too: she feels it in the floor, feels it come up through her toes and the flat of her feet. “Are you all right?”

“Of course I am. I mean—”

He stands before her and leans in intently, reaching out with careful hands. She’s been unable to stop thinking about his hands ever since he’d handed her a gold ring from prehistorical Earth, ever since she’d felt the reverence in them carrying into hers. Now he handles her face with the same reverence—no, Dalmora, she admonishes herself. The same _care_. He is careful. His fingertips skim carefully over the edge of her cheek, drawing back far too quickly. Quick as he might have been, she still feels his fingerprints burning onto her cheekbone, and she willingly tips her face up for further excavation.

He looks down at his hand. She sees magenta and crimson tipping the skin. “Dalmora,” he says again, all stern caution, and it still catches her and went through her. Her name traveling a complete circuit through her body, making her very aware of the space she takes up in his room.

“Yes?”

“Have you been outside?”

She remembers why she’s here, now. “Jarra brought in flowers,” she begins. “I came in to tell you,” and he turns with perfect calm and goes into the bathroom. Behind the half-cracked door, she hears water running.

“There’s a Kinsey event on,” he says. “I thought you knew.”

“They call it the Eleusis Mystery here. I didn’t know that.”

“Yes, well.” He talks over the water, voice echoing between the rooms. “Typically Betan.”

The name pings through her thoughts. She speaks, carefully, trying to draw out what she remembers:

“ _Thebes must learn, unwilling though she is, that my Bacchic revels are something beyond her present knowledge and understanding._ ”

The water stops running. “What?”

“I’m not—not being nardle, I don’t have my literature and my history at cross, do I? It’s the same thing, isn’t it? Eleusis, Bacchus, Orphic?”

Playdon stands at the door of the bathroom, looking grazzed. “Euripides. From prehistorical drama. My father thinks he’s zan.” Playdon still doesn’t speak. He looks as though she’d thrown something at him from across the room, and as though it’s hit its mark. She sees him raise a hand toward the door-frame, sees his knuckles go white with how hard he’s holding on. Her words speed up, rambling ahead of her thoughts, pointless and loud in the room. “There’s a Pentheus planet in the sector, isn’t there? The one with the earthquakes? And maybe a Thebes moon?”

“I know Euripides,” he says at last. He blinks and shakes his head. “I forget, you know.” He gestures to her. “Alpha sector. _How_ Alpha sector.”

She feels her face flushing, warmer now than she’d been when he was touching her. She wants him to touch her again, though she hasn’t a clue how to ask. How to speak, with the want so loud in her head. All the words that rise to her tongue are borrowed, millennia-old. That’s _so_ Alphan. Not where it counts, though: she can’t summon up any Alphan decency to go along with it, to keep her quiet and sensible. Not right now.

“Is there a cure?” she asks softly and he shakes his head. She sees water droplets go flying and realizes he hadn’t just washed his hands but his face and hair as well. Her hands itch to touch, wanting to see if the water is still cool on his face, and underneath it if his face is as hot as hers feels. She edges her hips to the side and sits on her hands. She is _fine_. Pollen-dusted but fine, and she came here to clear her head.

“What?” he asks, voice sounding a little waterlogged as well.

“For—if you’ve been really nardle and put your face near Kinsey blossom. Is there anything to do about it?”

He doesn’t talk for about a year.

“Dalmora,” he says seriously, at last, “you shouldn’t be here.”

“I thought you’d know!” Tears spring to her eyes, unasked-for and unwelcome. “You’re the most practiced off-worlder—”

“Yes,” he says, and his voice is soft and his mouth tilts toward half a smile, though not a pleased one. “Because I’m older. In charge.”

“You’re our friend.” She stands. “Jarra’s guest.”

“This was a mistake.”

She waits, unmoving—she’s not sure for what. Finally, with something of a sigh, he hangs his head and walks back toward her. “I should see you out,” he says, eyes on the floor, that unhappy smile still hanging around his mouth. “I’m sorry. Drink lots of water and go to sleep early.” He coughs, puts a hand up to the base of his throat. She has to strain to hear what he says next, to himself more than to her:

“I’ll do the same.”

Watching him cross the room takes an eternity, but at last he is at her side, and his hand reaches out toward her with perfect and careful decorum.

_I am not an artifact,_ she thinks, _I will not break, I will not crumble to dust_ —but she bites her tongue. For one thing, she’s not sure she _won’t_ fall to pieces at a touch, not then. She’ll have to see. Closing her eyes, she waits for his land to hand, for the dizzying clarity of contact.

His palm lights carefully between her shoulders, and she sighs, she can’t help it, and feels the hand flinch away from her. His palm hovers over her back, so near she swears she can feel heat through the sari. Can feel his handprint on her. She turns and he reaches again and—it is an accident, it has to be—his fingers slip along the draped hem of her sari and land below, skimming down to the bare curve of her waist.

She had been trying to brace herself, just to feel the weight of his hand. To look a little less ridiculous, like she isn’t totally powered, like she could _handle herself_ for chaos sake. She isn’t prepared for skin on skin. When she opens her eyes, the colors of the room seem a little warmer, the very sunlight flushing where it pours in through the window. His hand goes very still on her waist, paralyzed by the contact, and she turns and lets her bare waist settle against his palm.

He looks almost as grazzed as he had when she’d said the Euripides bit.

Accidents happen on-site all the time, but he has the most careful hands of anyone she knew. Gold flashes behind her eyes, gold and tarnish, her warm palms still carrying the memory of the first time he ever touched her at all. Their first day. It has never been an accident. It can’t have been.

She draws her own hand down to rest on his, fingers brushing his knuckles and palm settling anchor-firm on the back. That hand isn’t going anywhere and doesn’t seem to want to. She can’t look up at him, not yet. Overwhelmed, still. She doesn’t have to look up to hear him gulp.

“I’m your instructor,” he says.

“This isn’t a site.”

His hand beneath hers stays where it is. Her other hand traces up through the air next to the curve of his neck. Leaning in, she presses her lips slowly to his.

For a moment, he freezes, and then she feels his lips parting beneath hers.

A catalogue of Dalmora’s dreams comes to life behind her eyes. She’s lived this before, can call the good warm glow of dreams made reality up easily into her head—she can remember the joy of her first time on vid easily, seeing herself in her first sari, and the first time she landed on Earth for school properly, too. Dreams have come faster and faster since she left Alpha; leaving had made her hungry for worlds, times, for the out-of-reach touch of history occasionally brushing at her fingertips. She keeps making new choices and they keep becoming tangible, and she’s better for it.

This is different: the dream she touches now, rendered real against her lips, comes from something dark and private in her. Hers to grapple with helplessly by night and consciously by day in the lecture hall. She’s tried to put the image, the desire aside. It’s come back to her, relentlessly, day after day. It kisses her now.

And she had not envisioned this. The sun-warmth of mouth to mouth, the room gold as a ring around them, the melt in her bones and the pollen on her lips. There is no thought in the room, only sensation and the blurry colors that place her squarely back in dreamland even if she did come here awake. She had not imagined the sound Playdon would make as the tip of her tongue traced between his lips, deep and private. Less pleasure in it than agony. She touches his cheek, wanting to draw the pain out of him, to bring him into the warm thoughtless fragrant thrum of sensation she feels, and his hand slips fully around her waist, pulling her in. Her eyes close, she sighs into the kiss, and for the first time since entering the room she stops trying to look sober.

A whole book of new sensation gets written in one sweet, golden second, before he wrenches back. His other hand lands hard on her other hip, firm atop fabric.

“Dalmora,” he says, eyes steady, though she sees him suck in the inner edge of his lower lip. She stretches in, breathing as he breathes, wanting to kiss the tension out of his mouth. Deity, he has to stop saying her name. Deity, never stop saying her name. “You’re not—yourself.”

She has never been more herself. The more she learns, the more herself she becomes: this has been true since she stepped onto the grounds of Earth, ever since a certain instructor saw a selfish Alphan girl taking up his time and she decided she had to be more to make her way forward. She’s been making her way and he’s been here to greet her every step of the way. She tries to explain this, now, their shared love for history’s half-tangibles buzzing in her fingertips, but words fade when she opens her lips. She takes his hand from her hip, turns it over in hers. Draws a ring on his palm and hopes he remembers. “Yes,” she says. “I am.”

“You’ve put your face square into a bouquet of Kinsey blossom. We can’t—” He pulls his hand back from her. It returns not to her hip but to her face, tipping up her chin. She follows its instruction, leaning back into him. His palm runs a slow line over her bare waist and she inhales a high, edged breath. She is beyond speech. If he doesn’t kiss her again, if he doesn’t peel her out of the beautiful fabric that’s weighing against her skin like an impact suit, if he doesn’t do anything but this—stroking this one stretch of bare skin slow and steady, handprint burning against the curve of her back—she thinks she might be content all the same.

His hand flinches off her, peeling back from her warm skin with palpable reluctance, and her tongue unlocks. “You said yourself there’s nothing to do about it,” she says slowly, looking up at him. Outside the sun is setting, and the light that washes the room is red as the flowers themselves. His head blocks the light, but she can see red and gold bright around him and has to lower her lashes to see him clearly. Through the veil of her lashes she sees his face, mapped with pain. She understands that, has seen it on him before. Pain, gravity. So rarely happiness, so rarely freedom.

“I would so like to see you happy,” she says softly. “I could be happy here.”

He closes his eyes.

“Please. Go drink some water and sleep as soon as you can. I won’t—take advantage of this.”

“I want—” she begins, and his hand goes to her lips. Draws over them, gently, fingertips agonizingly featherlight, and the onrush of sensation overwhelms her once more. The edges of his fingernails, the whorls of his fingerprints: she memorizes them in an instant and every inch of her skin wants to learn them personally.

He is shaking his head.

“Dalmora, as—” He steps back. When she reaches out, he catches her hand again. “Not as my student. As—someone I trust. Do not ask me this.”

The anguish settles over him like dust, like the pollen smudged onto her face, and she realizes through the haze that this is more than her first kiss, more than just her dream made taunting flesh. His wife—has he kissed anyone since his wife?

“Please.”

There is grief in his voice, a raw edge she’s seen glimpses of but that he’s always managed to mask. Understanding takes her slow, shame pricking her thornlike through the flower-fog, until it’s too much to face him or herself. She presses her face into his shoulder, blotting out her vision and trying not to weep, and for a moment feels his hand on the back of her neck, fingers stroking softly over her light-strung hair.

“It’s all right,” she hears him saying softly, and his voice sounds as though it’s coming through ten broken connections, but she can feel it through his shoulder. Unburdened of its words and thrumming under his skin. “It’s all right. You’re all right. Just not like this, Dalmora. Not like this.”

Her name is a last earthquake against her cheek, echoing between bone and fabric and her own hot ashamed forehead. Gently, all archaeological care, he draws her face back, braces his palms against her clothed shoulders.

“You’ll be fine in the morning,” he says, eyes on the wall behind her.

She lets him guide her to the door. His steps are slow and stiff, as though he is being careful with himself as well.

When the door closes behind her she presses her cheek to the metal and swears she can still hear the ragged, pained edge of his breath echoing on the other side.

_Not like this._

_Like what, then?_

Like something good that she worries, now, that she has spoiled forever. Has stuck a clumsy hand in and broken in her haste to grab it. She was so _nardle_ , she thinks, so unprepared, so selfish after so long trying not to be, and she pulls herself away from the metal and tries to walk away calm, but she’s not halfway down the hall before she breaks into a run.

 

 

 

 

 

Raven makes his way blind through the halls. This he can do, can do with his eyes closed, though they aren’t closed now. Just occluded, full of things that aren’t there. Once he’d managed to make his way through an Adonis desert of sand that cut like glass, and during storm season beside. Better this than that, probably. He can manage without eyes, with hands tied back, with legs that didn’t work. Any of his senses can be compromised: sights, scents, touch, and none of them will stop him from doing his job.

Though his senses have never been compromised like this: head fogged with pollen, hands buzzing too hard to hold a gun steady, eyes half-blind still. Blinking out the glow of Jarra, Jarra aglow under her skin, Jarra’s mouth on his.

He draws his lower lip into his mouth and finds pollen there and feels the echo of her tongue drawing over his lip and then he forces his face into stillness entirely. _Stop moving. Keep moving._ Contradictory instructions. The laser sawing through him had been less pain than running was now. Walking was worse. At least the laser had been quick.

He behaved himself. He had, he had. Jarra would have nothing to regret in the morning, and Fian nothing to dispute. He’d saved himself, so why was he still drowning?

Every place they touched him is afire still, even through his uniform. Fian’s fingertips, angry, against his shoulders. Jarra’s soft hands and glowing skin. Perhaps a true bodyguard would have taken the offer. One who wasn’t sworn to the precepts of knighthood. _Nobility, honour, grace, valour and perfection in all virtues, champions of justice—_

Nothing for flowers and madness, for glowing girls and their golden boys. He tries to find honour in himself, now, running through the halls half statue and half prone. Grace is somewhere back beyond the field, unreachable. She’d asked, she’d wanted, and furious Fian had tugged his collar close— 

He’d walked through the desert, fought an Adonis lion by hand, burned his way through a hydra-swamp, a thousand other trials that had landed him here, and nothing in the world had prepared him for this.

Even if he left the room, and left them to each other, as they’d much prefer when they were sensible again, he can still do something for the hall and everyone in it. In the hallway, he finds the bowl that Dalmora discovered—she has a knack for making beautiful things appear from nowhere—exactly where she’d placed it, on the shelf. Picking it up, he holds it at arm’s length and turns toward the door.

His uniform, uncreased in all their travels, sticks to his skin now. He raises an arm to brush a bead of sweat from his temple and his sleeve brushes his face. His adamantly pinkened sleeve, freshly anointed by the flowers. Pollen in his eye, pollen in his mouth, pollen kissing a path up his cheek, pollen squarely up his nose. Protocols for handling dangerous material: gone. Somewhere beyond the field. Somewhere back on Adonis, now. Somewhere the Draven Fedorov Seti Raven that had completed the trials was watching him and finding him entirely wanting.

Send him another Adonis lion, for nuke’s sake. Save him from this.

Then again, these days, his training is less and less in protecting himself. So here he is in the hallway, with the dangerous material, alone, duties entirely intact.

He doesn’t have a second even to sneeze before he feels the blossom’s effects amplifying, loosening his joints, warming skin that doesn’t need any further encouragement. Drawing a warm line down his cheek where it lit along his skin, recalling fingers or begging for them. Alone, with no one to watch him wilt, he sinks against the wall. Half simple blizz, to let the weight off his feet for a moment, to let something else hold him up. Even untouched. There is some relief to be found yet.

Not much. His mouth still tastes like the kiss. Which had tasted like pollen, which was a ridiculous attachment to make when everyone’s mouth in the entire nuking hall tasted like pollen by now—No. That wouldn’t help. He presses his hand harder to his temple. No mouths. No thinking. Just catch your breath.

Slowly, he knocks his head into the wall. It doesn’t help either. The Kinsey blossom effects make it difficult to feel pain: the knocks on his skull register as a different kind of pleasure. One that somewhat reminds him of Fian’s hand on his shoulder, with Jarra’s eyes on both of them. The lights on her face bright and brighter. Did she know she flickered when she was touched, that she burned with the Kinsey effect? He doesn’t think it was just in his head, his nardle hazy head. Right before he’d thought Fian on the verge of throwing a punch, right before he’d worried he’d have to knock him out properly, she’d been Zeus’s third sun.

He stops banging his head.

The flowers have to go—and it was a blessing these were all she’d brought inside, for all the good it had done any of them. The autovacs would more than take care of the pollen overnight. He’ll take them outside and that will be the end of it, save having to weather the night alone. For a moment, he thinks of staying in the field for the night. The sensations might overwhelm him completely—fine, he’d quit _thinking_. Be lost to feeling as the rest of them, give himself over with no one but the flowers to witness his final undoing.

He knows better. Wincing, he pushes himself up slowly, arms out again, cautious of his balance. The blood in his ears is loud as a set of footsteps, and quickening.

No—he is hearing footsteps, an uneven pitter-patter he’d mistaken for a heartbeat until it, she, the feet, Dalmora are right in front of him. He turns just in time for her to crash into him.

Normally, Dalmora Rostha of all people wouldn’t be able to knock him off his feet. Today, he’s midstep and the world is tilting around him and it goes firmly sideways. He can hardly breathe. That, he realizes swiftly, is because she has landed on top of him. At least he’s saved someone from something, even if it was Dalmora from the floor.

The bowl crashes violently to the floor beside them. A historical replica, of course, but a good one, and thus breakable. It shatters into clay shards, scattering roots and petals over the floor. Dalmora looks like she’s about to cry. “Please,” he says, or tries to say—she isn’t heavy, not very. What she is is on top of him, and he is very aware of her body. Every line, every curve, every twitching change and uncomfortable shift. He breathes in, slowly, “It’s not your fault.”

He shifts his weight beneath her, trying to get hips-hands-heels beneath him so he can push himself up, but he gets to hips and feels hers roll against his and a sharp cry jerks itself out of him, an awful serrated helpless sound. He falls back against the floor. Bad idea. Dalmora looks at him, stricken-faced.

“I’m sorry,” she says, breathless. “Did you land wrong?”

This isn’t her fault. There is no one that deserves this less than she does. He goes as still as he can, tries to forget he has a body entirely and perhaps the body will stop reacting. It’s not going to do anything useful until she’s off him.

“No.” No good. He grits his teeth, closes his eyes, tries to think of anything that might combat this. Nothing. He is on the floor and he’ll be lucky if he can stand at all and the minute Dalmora realizes—

Dalmora realizes. He sees it on her face.

She takes in a slow breath and her body goes rigid with caution against his. He watches the look in her eyes change—not to disgust, but something short of compassion. Her dark eyes are near-blackened with pupil, and he can see a sheen of sweat on her skin. He forces his eyes away, to the ceiling.

“I’m sorry.” Every word is a painful effort. “This is unforgivable—an unforgivable compromise.” Weak-limbed and statue-stiff and trapped under the person in the hall who knows his vows probably as well as he does, who knows exactly what sort of man he’s currently failing to be. _Deity take me_ , he thinks, and Deity, he means it. “I was trying to get rid of them,” he says, not that there was any justification on Zeus. “The Kinsey blossom—”

“This is my fault.”

“It’s not.”

“I came crashing into you.” Her face is thunderstruck. Whatever griefs were nipping at her heels outweigh their shared shame now. Part of him is rudely grateful that she is thinking of something other than his body under hers, as though that pardons him, and the rest of him knows better and feels entirely cruel. Wants to ask her what’s wrong and can’t find the tactful words, or any words at all. “I haven’t had any grace in me all day,” she says, half to herself, and he hears the shame that works through her voice ripple through her body. An incremental motion makes her hips quiver, her stomach tense. He feels every inch of it and— _Deity!_ —he wants to die. He might die here, like this. Slow and conscious and undignified, with SECOP’s last footage a projection of Dalmora Rostha’s admittedly unbelievably beautiful face. At least they could be happy.

“You’re not—” he breaks off to breathe, with painstaking slowness—“sworn to it. You’re not stretching an oath.”

He hasn’t broken it. He hasn’t. Still, he is aflame under his uniform to such a degree that he has to have disgraced the wearing of it.

Dalmora looks down at his face with sudden, focused softness, with kindness he hasn’t earned. “You’re hurt,” she says, shifting; he groans and he does sound wounded, even to his own ears. “It’s—” She breaks off, swallowing. Another shudder. “It can’t be helped, and being alone with it is—is punishing. There’s nothing that you’ve done that’s against the oath.”

A wry smile twists his lips, which have gone very dry. He doesn’t want to lick them again, not with the echo of Kinsey kisses still lingering on them and not with her face so near his. “You mentioned grace?”

She raises a hand to his face, fingers lighting just barely on the edge of his hair. He feels them hover, heat in the space between their skin. When she lets them come to rest, lets them stroke softly against his forehead, the contact sends a lightning bolt of sensation through him. It cuts through the fog, focuses him in an instant: there is suddenly nothing in the world but Dalmora’s fingertips on the edge of his scalp.

A simple, gentle gesture.

“There’s nothing about chastity,” she says, voice is light, factual, gentle as her touch.

Except that her touch burns with the same heat that he feels, and her voice shakes with an echo of something else. Kinsey blossom in her hair, in her mouth, sending both of them running through the Tell clan halls.

He can see her face blurring above his, watches desire drown both gentleness and sadness. Kinsey blossom palpably warming in her cheeks, she leans in. Her chest skims over his, and he feels his breath hitch and change, feels the catching static of it move through her as well.

Then her nose is at the tip of his nose and her mouth is a breath from his mouth and he can taste the Kinsey perfume in the air and he cannot say who kisses whom. Only that her lips are on his and his mouth is open beneath hers and he feels her breathe a small anguished noise into his mouth.

Her chest presses flush against his, her front soft and arching forward, and he feels, he _feels_. All he can do is feel, from the warm press of mouths to the live wire between his legs. Every inch of him is consumed, useless with feeling. His first weak day since the dig accident. Weakness then had been for a good reason, at least, fresh and impatient out of the recovery tank. How to recover from this? Pleasure high as anguish, and every anguish rolling around back to pleasure.

Dalmora’s mouth is as unpracticed as his. It doesn’t make a difference. She tastes like perfume, like they both do. He feels her teeth graze his upper lip and his arms slide around her and _Deity Deity if you’re listening Deity_ his hands are on her waist, her bare waist. She slides her thighs around one of his, sari skirt wrapping modestly around her legs, and the fabric is tight and he can feel her hips rolling against his, can feel the curves of her body molding with painful ecstasy to his. Every kiss they share rakes new little sounds out of her, incomprehensible, a list of names half-cried half-tongued into his mouth like a new rolling devotional, he did not _ask_  to learn a new dialect today, doesn't deserve—

He sits up. It takes work, a great deal of work, and she slides further into his lap as he did so, curve of her legs slipping into his hands. He should let her go. He doesn’t.

“This isn’t—”

_Me,_ he thinks, or _right_ , or _you_. An Adonis Knight, taking advantage of a girl in despair. Her body not her own. He tries to remember that, even as his palms rise to the band of her skirt at the base of her spine and burn against the fabric. “You don’t have to, to do this—you don’t have to, to pardon me for this. Not _like_ this. I’m,” he says, swallowing, “not like this, I’ll be all right if you leave me to it—”

Once again, she puts her hand on his face. Braces her fingers beneath his chin until he looks up at her. Her loveliness makes his head swim—she deserves better, he thinks, than a failed oath in a wrinkled uniform lying on the floor covered in pollen. She has a princess’s beauty, Helena’s beauty, flower-delicate.

Not the day to think about flowers. Not as compliments. He banishes that, though he can’t banish her warm rough breath, her fragrance, her warmth, the serpentine shape of her in his lap.

“Raven,” she says and his name rolls slowly off her tongue, catching on the need in her voice. Not a challenge, not a condemnation, no titles. Titles, that was it: she’d spoken them into his mouth, kissed them into his mouth. She knows. And he looks at him steady-eyed now and he understands that whatever else has gone wrong today, oddly enough, Dalmora doesn’t find him a wanting knight. “If you tell me to go—” She swallows, hard, shudder passing through her shoulders and down to her hips. Rolling them again against his. He wants to press harder up against her, to feel her more fully. Deity. No. But the floor’s at his back and his skin is sticking to hers and there’s nowhere to move.

“I’ll go. But if you don’t—”

He can’t tell her to go anywhere. Even if he wanted to. Not with her hips where they are, fitted like a puzzle to his, her thighs clenched around his. “This isn’t a kindness you need to do,” he says, and she looks like she might laugh.

Her hand traces over the mosaic on the floor beside them, fingers running through clay splinters and paint-dust and soiled roots until she found one flower left intact from their collision.

“I’m not being kind,” she says. “You’re not the only one who’s—bearing it. Who shouldn’t _have_ to bear it alone. What I feel now—no one should.”

She looks him steadily in the eye and picks up the flower, whole and perfect and fitting neatly into her palm.

“It’s not your fault. Will you believe me now?”

Not breaking eye contact, she buries her nose in the blossom.

She lifts her face slowly, pink streaking her nose and mouth. In spite of that her face is bright, bright with decision and desire and surrounded by the lights in her hair. The look in her eyes is clear in spite of the desire, clear and shining, as though she is looking at something beautiful. He hears his oath thrum in his ears, less and less a chastisement, its virtues clearer because she can see them in him. Even now. Valor and compassion tangling up in her fragrant needy skin, her pardoning hands, her voice. She is speaking again and her voice shivers against him; he hears her dimly around the wild echo of his own blood:

“Save me.”

Then his hands are sliding hard up the bare expanse of her back and he is kissing her until he stops being able to feel his lips. She gives a soft, grateful cry and clings to him, fingers stroking his face, along the lines of his tattoo, and he rolls her over onto her back, wanting to kiss her more fully and to see her as he kisses her. Her half-lowered eyelids and the pink streaks on her nose and a bronze flush smearing outside the lines of her lips. He can taste makeup, an odd powdered delicate chemical taste, in with the pollen on his lips, a reminder that there is something beyond the flower. That it is Dalmora he is kissing. Dalmora, who wants kissing and maybe more. Looking down at her, he hears the echo of the sounds she made, hears them a little clearer now that she isn’t keening them against his lips: _Captain_ and _Adonis_ and _Raven,_ all of them together, but his name the one that lingers on her lips, like her lipstick on his.

He draws the wrap of her sari to the side and lets his fingertips, wondering, trace down the soft bare slope of her belly, and she arches her back. Her nails scrabbling audibly against the floor, and he feels every inch of him flush.

“We shouldn’t,” he says, and the look in her dark eyes is pained again, edged with instant sorrow and climbing Alpha-taught shame when she looks up at him. _No_ , he thinks with a twinge, _no, I didn’t mean_ —

He finishes: “Not on the floor.” 

Just because he’s used to sleeping on the floor doesn’t mean she should have to—not among the rubble—

She relaxes and slides her palms into his, letting him pull her up. “I’m sleeping in the first guest room,” she says, powering sweet, and he wraps his arms around her waist, her hips, and carries her toward the corner of the hall. For someone that had knocked him off his feet, she feels near weightless now. He’s not carrying weight, just sensations: her chest pressed to his, her arms wound around his neck, looking up at him and reinventing virtues in him even through the haze.

 

 

 

 

 

Half of Jarra is in her body, flushed and sweat-drenched and riding Fian hard into the mattress. Fian is hoarse, voice gone as her thighs clench against his hips, as she trembles, sweat and pollen in her hair, pollen and Fian unstringing and restringing her nerve endings. Half of her is on the other side of the wall, or somewhere in it. She thinks she can hear herself, echoing. As though all of Tell hall is as powered as she is, the whole building crying out in the same ecstasy. As though it is in the walls.

 

 

 

 

 

When Dalmora unwraps herself from the sari, hardly trusting her own hands to know the folds better than he would, she worries she’ll find scorch-marks where he’d held her. Swept her off her feet and brought her to her room, her whispered guidance in his ear like—well, like the directives she’d heard come through his head, but she couldn’t think about that now. No one else is talking now. Her head is full but not fogged, and all sounds amplify painfully, in her head, under her feet, currents thrumming under her skin. Her heartbeat and his. His breath and hers. The drum of footsteps and something more, something that shook the Tell hall walls. There is no weather involved in the Kinsey event and no storm warnings for the evening, but she swears the ground is quaking underfoot. From the soles of her feet to the insides of her thighs, she feels it.

An Adonis Knight picked her up and carried her to—to some kind of rescue. A dream, again, this one dusted out of her girlhood, the image snapping into raw clarity as his arms wrapped around her waist and hips. She’d pressed her face to his shoulder, seen him in broken pieces, the lines on his face and the kindness as well, the bars of his uniform and the snapping-tension in the shoulders beneath. When she’d let herself sigh his arms had grown taut around her, and she’d pressed her face to his neck. Let herself taste the skin there, the pollen and the sweat and the swallowed outbursts locked in his throat.

Propriety was somewhere on Alpha. He understood how much she was forgoing and that, somehow, made it easier. Makes it easier now.

Raven. Captain, Knight of Adonis.

She never thought about wanting him. Hadn’t thought about wanting anything but Playdon, for one, and hadn’t let herself think about that. And Raven—even now he is all image, all high-gloss glory. What beneath it? Kindness. Truth. She doesn’t know what else. The Adonis-knighthood was impenetrable, flawless: the knighthood, the valor, the uniform, the duty. The duty, and he was _Jarra’s_ , after all, Jarra’s and Fian’s, something belonging to the side of history she wants to capture more than enact. A glorious image in the vid-frame, something she can explain more than something she is herself.

She hadn’t thought about touching that glory, nor the man wearing it. Until she did. And now he’s here in the room with her, and when she turns around he’s let himself out of his jacket, though not his skintight and not his trousers.

She has her choli on, still, and her underwear. Had let everything else, sari and lehenga, fall into a sinuous shining pile on the floor: her hands were shaking too badly to fold them, to treat them as they deserved. It only mattered that they are off her, now. That she can move, that there’s more bare skin for him to touch.

She doesn’t know where to begin, except by moving forward. So she makes her way around the bed and lays her hands on his shoulders and feels him move against her, the roll of his shoulders against her palms. Not forward but back—her hands are so light on him but he reacts like he’s been pushed. Stumbles back toward the bed and falls, and catches her by the waist as he does.

Kisses her and runs a hand from the nape of her neck down to the back of her legs and she’s so clear in her head and her body, so steady as she kisses him and figures it out. She’s sensible where he holds her. Nothing _but_ sense. She was brought here in his arms: whatever else happens, she’s not afraid of trespassing. Not now, the air fragrant between them, him reaching up to twine a hand through her hair. Here, door shut, bed soft, she feels oddly safe, in a way that she doesn’t think is just Kinsey-haze. Hard to feel danger when he’s the one here with her—that’s the whole point. She’s never met anyone who believes in his purpose quite like Raven, with such clear strength that he makes all of Alpha’s ceremonies and social hurdles almost make sense. If only everyone was like him. If only everyone—she clasps her thighs tight to his waist, strung with heat and tension, trying to get close enough that the clothes might just fray away between them without her help—could put the ceremony aside like this every now and again.

She leans into the kiss and looks him over. He is trembling, to her astonishment, beneath her. The lines of his body wound tight—with Kinsey and without its help. She runs a hand over his chest, draws the lines of muscle beneath his skintight. Then lower, and she feels him shake. The same sense of earthquake that she had before, ricocheting through him, weather-careless. She is brave, frighteningly brave, flower-garlanded and fearless and full of desire.

The room is safe. She says, “It’s all right.” She draws down the zipper for him, too full of heat to feel herself blushing. The Alphan girl in her, shy and proper for the next five or ten years, closes her eyes. The rest of her is wildly awake.

Now he is watching her, eyes wide, a palm perched precariously on the curve of her hip. The other hand traces lightly down the curve of her arm, a burning line over the inside of her elbow, to her wrist. Wraps around her wrist as she slips her hand inside, and she goes slow, his trousers chafing against her thighs, and he doesn’t stop her.

She hits skintight—enough, for now—runs a palm over the ridge between his legs and he throws his head back, throat to the ceiling, fingers hard on her wrist. She hisses softly, tongue between her teeth, and he looks back up, unwinding his fingers in an apologetic instant.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and his face is earnest with worry that breaks through the pollen-glaze. “Dalmora, be careful!”

For a moment she thinks she’s done something wrong. Then it hits her that she’s done something right. She bites her tongue, trying not to laugh. “I told you you didn’t have to worry,” she says, and his expression is full of doubt, until she strokes him again and his face is wiped clean of anything else. “It’s all right.” Sweat is gluing the choli to her skin. She wishes she’d taken the time to get it off. The Kinsey-blossom scent is more alive than ever in the room, soaking from her pores and his. She can taste it. On him, too. They’re pardoned, pardoned, pardoned, they get the night off from behaving well. “We’re all right.”

He bites his lip, closing his eyes, and she wasn’t making it up: the wall _is_ shaking, threaded through with cries of passion. A Betan hall, built to show off, with archaic materials—stone, not flexiplas. Not soundproofed. Cries and curses and muffled thuds, sounds like a war vid. She recognizes Fian’s low curses, Jarra’s giggle.

A new onrush of heat floods her, muddling her senses. Not shame, not _now_ , but something else. Raven blinks, looks at her, hears, and sits bolt upright. The motion throws her closer in, against his chest. She tenses her thighs around his waist to keep from falling, hips bracing to his, and his mouth is open an astonished inch from hers.

“I should go,” he is saying absurdly, “I should be on guard—”

“Raven?” She raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think anyone is being hurt.”

“I’m not off-duty,” he says, and she lost Playdon— _she’snotthinkingaboutthat_ , the flower smooths her regrets—to propriety and private grief, but this isn’t the same. The griefs in him, he’s spinning for himself. She draws her fingertip down his chest again and feels him on the brink of unspinning.

She kisses him. Light and slow, tasting the dry heat on his lips.

“You’re in no state to protect anyone.”

“I’m a letdown,” he says, though he lies back down, and she shakes her head, veiling them both with the curtains of her hair.

“You’re good.”

His eyes snap open, lock onto hers. “What?”

His trousers have slipped halfway down his hips, worked down as she rocks gently against him and slides her hand back down. He’s got a statue-body beneath his clothes, she can feel it, rock-carved and deliberate and beautiful, beautiful like something that should be kept on Alpha and admired. Except that she’s never felt a statue shake before. The walls cry out and so does she, for him: this is another kind of duty. Another new kind of knowledge. She goes with what she knows; she thinks she knows him better than she realized.

“Noble,” she says, mouth brushing his, speaking clear enough to drown out the muffled cries, and he won’t look away from her. The blood is rushing in her, the world shrinking down around them, a tight second skin. Her words making sense of their fighting heartbeats. Her hand winds between them, warm between her legs, stroking between his. Winding their racing pulses together. Her tongue is dry in her mouth but the words shiver through her as she speaks, thrum down to her core. “Honourable. Full of grace, full of valour, perfect in all virtues, a champion of—”

He gives a final, aching cry, hips bucking up against her palm.

“Justice,” she says softly, completely, kissing him.

He draws back, grazzed and shaken, the tension out of him and the fragrant sweat dampening his hair. Looking at her, he opens his mouth. “I’m afraid I’m—”

She sighs half a laugh against his mouth. His body is no less carven beneath her, but she feels how the tension’s gone out of him and she lays her damp cheek to his.

“No apologies.”

He turns his head and looks at her with slow, gathering certainty. Gathers himself again, limbs rallying wearily again. She strokes his shoulders, a gentle absolution, and he shakes his head at her. “Let me kiss you,” he says, and he holds her by her hips as she leans down again. Gently, he shakes his head again, touches her mouth. The scrape of fingers on lips feels familiar—but she won’t look back. Instead she looks down as he leans up to kiss her stomach, gasps as he shifts her up against his face. His fingers—with permission—stretch the hem of her underwear to the side, trace her delicately.

When she looks down, she can still make out his eyes, and she wants to laugh again, as much as she wants to scream and scratch at the walls and come apart at every joint already: beneath the haze, he’s still as dogged as ever. Another kind of duty, one thing after another. But not laborious. She thinks. She sees.

He kisses her thigh and then the seat of her underwear and he’s the one speaking, now, though she can only half make out the words.

She knows them. Feels them echoing from her own mouth just a second before. Pleasure grips her silent, now, but her heart’s still beating in time with his tongue.

Full of grace, full of valor, perfect in all virtues.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s dawn when Jarra wakes up, Fian’s arm thrown heavy and comforting over her chest, and she’s calmed down a little. Mostly. Somewhere after she’d lost count of rounds, they’d fallen asleep. Now her limbs ache, but in a zan well-worked kind of way, a better fatigue than the one that comes from the suit, and her head’s clear.

Mouth’s dry, though. She slips out from and off of Fian, out of their combined heavy knot, not disturbing his sleep—Fian sleeps like the dead. She drops a quick kiss on his forehead and looks out at the dawn light.

The hills are back to their normal color, mostly, not covered in red. She squints, tries to see if any flowers are left. One night, Drago had said. Every twenty-five years, she’d overheard from SECOP, if she heard right. A big if. Shouldn’t be much danger in going out to check, and even if there is—she looks back at Fian and bites back a giggle, not wanting to wake him up. Not much of a danger.

She goes to the bathroom, splashes water on her face and in her mouth, and has a foot out the door when the door to the next room slams open and Raven stumbles out in his skintight and trousers, unjacketed and crumpled. She has to take a step back, take him in, grazzed. He looks like he’s been through a storm.

He flushes. “I heard footsteps,” he begins, and she can’t help but giggle, closing the door carefully behind her.

“Came to check and see if it was a murderer?”

Stubborn as ever, regardless of what planet they’re on and whose house: “Yes.”

She smiles at him, won’t let the smile falter. The night before is ringing in her head, and she takes a step to the side, hip bumping into the door behind her. The clumsiness jars her, makes her get her head together. She grins at him, apologetic. Seven thousand sentences fight to get onto the tip of her tongue— _I’m sorry_ , no, _did you have a good night,_ no, _how’s this for Betan vacationing,_ no, no, no.

“Made a nardle of myself last night,” she says, “didn’t I?”

“No worse than me.”

“What did you do?” she asks, and he blushes. Slowly, she looks at the door behind him, looks him over now.

This she knows better than to say, but she’s really glad he didn’t end up sleeping on the floor.

There’s a scratch on his arm. She leans in to look. “You’re going to want a fluid patch,” she says, neutral as she can be, zero giggles, and he glances down and shakes it off.

“It’s from the bowl. I’m sorry—the bowl the flowers were in got broken—”

She lifts an eyebrow. She doesn’t care about broken replica bowls, but she suspects she cares about this story. “How?”

“Dalmora ran into me,” he says very quickly and tonelessly, and the image of Dalmora levelling an Adonis Knight is too much for Jarra. She claps a hand to her mouth, grinning into her palm, and thinks about what must’ve come next. She looks back at the door and finds it really hard to regret bringing the flowers in.

Behind her hand, she takes him in again, and beneath all the dishevelment—and Deity believe she's taking in the dishevelment, this is the _real_ Event—there’s a looseness to his movements that’s brand new. Again, hard to regret. She thinks of the night before, tries to pull herself out of Eleusis frenzy, and thinks—

The cries she heard, the echoes, they weren’t just her.

Behind her hand, she tries to steady her expression. Maybe the Eleusis isn’t totally out of her yet. And it’s zan in the theoretical. In the practical, taking shape and sound in her head, it’s a lot to take in. Her teeth nip into her lip and she tries not to treat the image of her friends in her head like a Betan vid, whatever sector they’re in now. The image, and the soundtrack, which she already has provided free.

She got a Raven’s-eye view of them, in spite of herself, she realizes. A Raven’s-ear view. And vice versa, though he’s used to it—she’s used to him being used to it—she mostly doesn’t think about it. Different, now, having both sides of the wall in her head.

It’s not that there’s anything she’d take back saying, exactly. It’s just—

“Jarra?” Raven asks, voice careful, and she drops her hand. Steadies herself, smiles at him.

“I was going to go out and look at the field. Want to come?”

His expression flattens. “Possibly never again.”

“Oh, come on,” she says. “You don’t have to worry for another twenty-five years. If you’re worried, I mean.”

If Fian wakes up, he’ll find her—he’ll see her out the window. Maybe she’ll bring back a dried blossom, wake him up powered. If she can find one. If not, she won’t need one.

She’s half down the hall when she feels his hand on her shoulder. “Should we wake them?” he asks, still careful, and she is still aware of his palm on her skin. They’re still friends. Weathered an Event together. They’re closer than ever, now, all of them. She just has to shake the last of Eleusis out of her. And she might have missed the sunset, but she wants to see the double sunrise.

“If you think they’re wake-able.”

“It seems fair,” he says.

She thinks, _Eleusis won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do._

It hadn’t. She wishes now, a little and unrighteously, that she and Fian had been the ones to make him smile like that, soft and secret and blushing under the lines, but she wouldn’t take back his and Dalmora’s night for anything. He and Dalmora both deserved a night off from being the perfect Alphans—she’s said that for nuking _ever_.

She knows better than to expect them to be totally normal about it today, now that everything makes sense again, now that their blood’s a little cooler. A little. But she’ll wait. They’ll be fine. They’ll be amaze, if they let themselves.

“I don’t want to leave them alone in the rooms,” he says, and it’s not just the bodyguard talking. She knows that. _Them_ —includes Fian, includes Dalmora now, the world’s getting bigger all the time and not just because she can travel now. Pretty Betan discovery, she thinks. Thanks a ton, Zeus and bad weather reports.

Raven will keep Dalmora from going full Alphan as only another Alphan can, she’ll pounce on Fian, knowing Playdon he’s already awake, and they’ll have breakfast, she decides. Normal, normal breakfast in the nuking normal fields. Even if she could probably eat an army’s helping of cheese fluffle while she looks at the view.

She wonders about Playdon’s night, though borrowed Deltan manners sew those thoughts shut pretty quickly. She guesses he’s pretty glad to have requested a bedroom that was faraway, anyway. Tonight Lolia and Lolmack will come to dinner, Amalie and Krath will be here within the week, then they’ll all head back to the dig together, heads on straight again.

Lucid, loose. She feels good, now, better than good.

Right now she wants to tell Raven how powered she is for him, but she thinks that might make his head explode. Dalmora and Eleusis can’t have unwound him _that_ much. She bites her tongue, and then hugs him, tight and wordless. And kisses him. On the cheek. A big, sweet, totally zan feeling cuts through the odd sharp cast of the pollen-taste that still lingers in her mouth—most of it, anyway. He tenses against her, then exhales, slow.

“Fine weather we’re having,” she says dryly and, Deity bless, he laughs. “Welcome to Beta sector. Welcome to Zeus.”

“Zeus has some other geographic features to recommend itself, I hear. The suns should keep rising for another hour or two yet.” His voice is quiet, morning-hushed in the echoing hall. “We’ve got time.”


End file.
